By his immediate actions, principally an executive order reversing the affordable health care program of his predecessor, and then his trumping the almost done Trans-Pacific Partnership which discombobulated the economic thrusts of several countries including long-time allies Japan, Australia, Taiwan, Singapore and even Chile, Donald Trump seems bent to order “his” America to do an about-face in his self-proclaimed march to make it “great again.”
Barack Obama tried to reassure his worried allies after the Trump victory, and after listening to his pronouncements, that the Trump victory would just be a “blip,” and viewed from the medium term, it would not be a period, just a “comma.”
Trump has the uncanny ability to paint bleakness even if the real facts may not square off with “his” facts, and be credible to almost half of America.
Listening to his inaugural speech, you would think his country was in the pits. But the truth is, the US economy is less bleak than how Trump described it. For the last six years, jobs have been gradually increasing, and the unemployment rate at end 2016 was 4.7 percent, close to what it was before the housing crisis.
In the last year of the Obama administration, the economy expanded by some 3.5 percent. The US Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the second time in a decade, confident that the economy is resilient.
It is the heretofore industrial belt states like Michigan and Ohio which have lost big, as US manufacturers shifted their labor-intensive operations to China, Mexico, Taiwan and elsewhere.
Another seemingly ironic promise is that he would “unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the earth.” Ironic because his rhetoric does not inspire unity among the other nations of the world. These countries still remember how the seeds of terrorism began with the US of A’s adventurism with the Taliban, Al Qaeda, even the beginnings of ISIS, and how America under Bush destroyed the “despotic” regimes of Saddam Hussein and Moammar Khadaffy who at least imposed a brand of stability in their fiefdoms.
Trashing the Trans-Pacific Partnership would actually be giving China a better hand. For now the countries that subscribed to the TPP are in limbo, and they constitute virtually 40 percent of international trade. Left to fend for themselves in a highly competitive world economic order, they just might cut their own deals with the second largest economy which is China.
And if China deals its hand strategically, taking the long-term vision rather than immediate gains, and managing its currency properly, the Trump volte-face may actually hasten the sleeping giant’s ascent into becoming the world’s largest economy, Numero Uno, faster than predicted.
Then Trump would have plunged his country, not into the promised greatness but into international humiliation and defeat.
For the “constant” allies like Japan, Taiwan, Australia and others, Trump would only have proven how “inconstant” an ally America can be.
And if he should pull the trigger into a full-blown trade war with the current Numero Dos, given America’s huge indebtedness, and given the American consumer’s addiction to low-priced goods which it perforce imports from other countries, mostly “made in China,” then the inflation it would create may just turn off even his most loyal vote support base.
Hope could turn into sudden disenchantment.
We do not know if our own president, Rodrigo Duterte, foresaw the current political maelstrom and the victory of the unpredictable “bigot” (that is how Duterte described candidate Trump when he was yet candidate Duterte), and thus vowed to spare the Philippines from being forsaken by an inconstant ally and sashaying into his independent foreign policy.
What a lot of local pundits described as Duterte’s “reckless” foreign policy statements may just turn out to be prescient strategy designed to protect our small country from the coming American about-face.
When that reality dawns upon us, and unless Trump and his Kushners think twice about their newly-proclaimed policies, then our president would be hailed not only as a determined crime and corruption nemesis, but as a nationalist statesman sans pareil.
I wrote in my previous article how the whole world is now placed on tenterhooks by the Trump presidency and his pronouncements. How the rest of the world reacts to the new American reality in the next few months will be worth watching.
Meanwhile, one recalls how Napoleon once said, “let China sleep, for when it awakes, the whole world will tremble.”